Native American Quotes

What do Native Americans (American Indians) say about writing, literature, and America? Here are are a few sayings and quotes in related to the Native Amerian experience.

• "With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new."
  - Sherman Alexie
  
  
• "It's impossible to write about Native life without humor—that's how people maintain sanity."
  - Louise Erdrich
  
  
• "It is my land, my home, my father's land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct."
  - Geronimo
  
  
• "It's important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever."
  - Joy Harjo